Travel Masters Podcast
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Travel Masters Podcast
Navigating the Waves of Family Vacation Bliss with Expert Travel Insights
Joining us today is Casey Carr from Sharon Carr Travel, adding his wealth of knowledge to our discussion on what makes or breaks a family-run travel agency. With anecdotes from stuffing envelopes to steering the helm of a legacy, Casey unpacks the essential ingredients of relationship-building and exceptional service that have propelled their business through the ever-shifting tides of travel trends and media consumption. Together, we navigate the sea of expertise that only comes from seasoned travel advisors, the kind who know that the right questions lead to perfect trips, and that a travel agent’s invaluable service doesn't have to cost you a penny more. Tune in, as we reveal the hidden layers of creating travel experiences that resonate across generations, and how intuition and personal touch are your allies in the journey to travel agency triumph.
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Yeah, and that's a skill that develops over time. Honestly, that is the value of having seasoned travel experts and agents who have been in the business for a long time. I think our longest employee has been here 26 years, wow, and everybody else has been here. You know, 15 years, almost 20 years. Yeah, years, almost 20 years, and you know it.
Speaker 1:It takes some time to develop that intuition where you're just listening to what your clients are saying and and understanding the product that maybe they're looking at, and then maybe you hear them mention that their, their kids are 14 and 8, and maybe they're looking at Holland America or another product like that.
Speaker 1:That might not be right for kids where I've had that experience recently, in fact, I was on Holland America and made her a wonderful cruise line and a fantastic product, but I had my five-year-old, four-year-old at the time, my three-and-a-half-year-old on board, and they do have a kids club, but that's it. It's very small and beyond that, they don't offer a lot for children, and so it was a lesson for my wife and I to learn, which we kind of knew going in. But just, there's a lot of value, if you're traveling with kids, to having something for them to do and having some things that cater to them, whether you're on land or looking at a cruise, and those are things that you don't really think about until you've traveled a lot and sent a lot of people on vacations and had these experiences learned by trial and error.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast.
Speaker 2:We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for our podcast. I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help. Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business.
Speaker 2:On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you, our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you and your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? So? What's the secret? What's the secret sauce that makes one travel agency extremely successful and makes it last for years, whereas the other travel agency out there that we compare it to might not be so successful. In fact, it might not even be persisting and be struggling right now, or, golly, gee, not even be here. What's the secret? What makes that different? Hmm, I don't know. I don't know that there is a secret. I tend to believe, from the old school, that I'm a part of that. It comes down to hard work and persistency and having a strategy of that. It comes down to hard work and and persistency and having a strategy that makes it happen. But our guest today is Casey Carr, and if anybody has a secret, it's Casey.
Speaker 2:Hey, welcome to the Travel Masters Community Podcast. My name is Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host today. Our guest is Casey Carr, who's with us right here. Casey, thank you so much for being with us and just to, to give everybody a a real quick uh background. We are a part of the travel masters community and they are bringing us to the show today. They are our, our sponsor right now. We're glad to have you with us, casey, and we're going to tell you more about the travel masters community as we get closer to the launch for that opportunity. Right now, let's get on with the show, casey. Thanks again for being here, brother, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to chat with us.
Speaker 1:My pleasure Morris.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. Well, let's get right down to it, man. What's the secret, casey? How did you do this? You're a part of Sharon Car Travel. That's your mom, right? Sharon's my mom, that's right. So we're in our second generation here. What's the secret, casey?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, my mom got my sister and I working in the business early. We kind of grew up in sharing car travel. I would say that we were up at the office after school stuffing envelopes and kind of learning the ropes. My sister started work at the agency about six years before I did. I went into the cruise industry actually after college. I worked for a couple of different cruise lines Carnival Cruise Lines and another sort of expedition river cruise line called Cruise West. That doesn't exist anymore but we did itineraries up the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington, so kind of following the Lewis and Clark Trail. So I learned the ropes in the travel industry that way but also just kind of grew up in the travel industry going on those trips.
Speaker 1:I think that we're kind of a unique agency in the Metroplex in terms of that. We're sort of high profile. We've been on the radio for a long time. We were on the air with Ron Chapman on KVIL for about 35 years until he retired and then on with Jody Dean on K-Love for 13 years, followed by Jeff Miles for another few years until K-Love unfortunately went by the wayside, as so many radio stations are doing, and changed formats. And this has been our first year off the radio actually in 50 years. Wow, we had a really long program. We're in talks with some other radio stations to come back on the airwaves in Dallas, but it's been a nice little reprieve, honestly, for the past year to just get caught up with a lot of things in our business.
Speaker 1:But, to answer your question, it probably comes down to sharing, car I think our longevity my mom has instilled in us and in all of our staff.
Speaker 1:You know, we're in the travel business, we're in the people business and that's what attracts a lot of us to the travel industry is that we're, we are developing relationships with our clients and, uh, we're part of the process of, of making their dreams come true. That's, that's a really fun part of the travel industry, um, and so I think a lot of our success comes from a just, honestly, an affection for people. That's how we feel. We love people and to get to be a part of these travel stories and memories and once in a lifetime experiences for them is a really uplifting experience and we work really hard and we're very successful in that regard in terms of our customer service and we have, you know, not only generations here working at the office, but generations of clients that we've worked with where we've you know the parents and then their children traveled with us, and now the grandchildren are traveling with us as well. So I think that's how we've stuck it out as long as we have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's just amazing. It's absolutely incredible. And now I'm sure that, as you say, you're dealing with the second, third generation of your clients and that's where a lot of your business is coming from. Did you find that all those years you were out there in the media? That? I mean, that's a marketing effort, right? Sure, yes. Did it provide a lot of traffic for you, a lot of people coming and going, or what?
Speaker 1:yes, yes, very much, and everything's changed, you know, from when we started this program. All the way back in 1971 was our very first trip was a week in Honolulu. We opened up the Sheraton Waikiki. We were the first group at that hotel and the power went out moments after our group arrived and I think we drank the hotel out of booze in the first two days. There's a lot of funny stories about it, but that trip was $300. It was $289 actually, if I remember correctly, and that was for airfare and hotel for a week back in 1971.
Speaker 1:Obviously, everything has changed since then. We had a really wonderful career on the radio and there was a time in radio when we would go on the air with a new trip and our phones would would ring off the hooks for for two or three days Um, and people would be lined up around the corner to to bring checks to us. And those days are are. You know, we we still have a lot of success on the radio, but everything's changed. The formats have changed in the way people um have changed and the way people consume media has changed quite a bit and unfortunately things are tough in a lot of radio markets and that's no different here or really in any major radio market around the country.
Speaker 1:So we always got a lot of people booking the trip that we were talking about. But we'd have people who are listening, who might not be interested in the trip that we're talking about, and give us a call for their honeymoon or just say, hey, I don't want to go to Alaska, but I'm interested in booking a package to Scotland in the summertime, and so we get a lot of people sort of calling on the periphery of those big trips. But no, when we announce a big trip on the air, usually it's around 50 passengers that we have room for and we tend to sell it out within a couple of weeks. Wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:So you put the trip together and then just get people to fill the seats on that particular excursion, that trip, right?
Speaker 1:That's right. We kind of customize our groups typically, and so it's a trip that we're building from scratch, really in partnership with our vendors and our ground operators who know the destinations, and so we build the trip. We make it as affordable as possible. You know we're not a budget office, we're not offering budget trips. We do offer that kind of thing quite frequently actually, but that's not the nature of our radio program. I wouldn't say they're very high quality and high value trips, but at costs that are affordable to people. And we accomplish that oftentimes by being able to customize our packages and by selling large groups, Because when you're traveling in big group numbers, obviously the price falls.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It really does Any other kind of marketing that you've done, that you've found to be really successful, that other folks ought to try in today's world.
Speaker 1:So we do a lot of in-person, face-to-face events. In COVID that got much trickier and it was in fact impossible for a year year and a half, something like that and we did a lot of Zoom presentations and things like that, which were successful, but minimally, and not the same feel, of course, as being face-to-face and having those conversations with our clients and finding out what their favorite trip was and what their preferences are, because everybody has very unique preferences when it comes to travel and part of a travel agent's job is to uncover that by asking intuitive questions and really taking the time to listen to our clients and determining what they need and trying to steer them in the right direction. And so you know, we've done basically every type of advertising. We've done television advertising, basically every type of advertising. We've done television advertising. We've been on with different radio markets all around the country and always had a fair amount of success there.
Speaker 1:We've done some social media marketing, some Facebook and Instagram marketing.
Speaker 1:Facebook tends to be where our demographic engages the most, so we put a little bit more towards there, but we don't actually spend a lot of money on Facebook or Instagram advertising.
Speaker 1:Maybe a couple times a year we'll give a whatever trip, a certain boost, but for the most part we're just communicating organically through posts, regular posts that we're not putting any money behind with our followers, and we get a fairly big response from Facebook, slightly less from Instagram, and we have a large email list as well and that's sort of our bread and butter, where we do the most of our marketing and our clients have come to expect where we're going to put out our, our trips and new details, new, new uh destinations, travel news, things that are happening in the industry, um, that we send out in our emails and talk about and we get a whole lot of engagement there.
Speaker 1:So I would say that probably email is number or number one marketing resource um, followed by radio, um and a little bit of television and then and then some social media marketing. We're just trying to get into some google marketing and decode that um, which is, uh, you know it's a whole other language to learn, basically. So, uh, we're we're digging into that a lot lately and just in the past couple years yeah, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:That's a whole another animal all to itself. I'm yeah, I'm not ready for that myself. The, uh, the, the thing you mentioned, casey, that I find just absolutely basic, and so very. I say basic meaning the it's the base of any business, but for sure a business like being in a travel agency or travel advisor is finding out what's really important to the client, finding out what they really want, and it's so much more than how many people are traveling, how old are they, when do you want to go, when do you want to come back and how do you want to get there. Right.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and that's a skill that develops over time. Honestly, that that is the value of having seasoned travel experts and and agents who have been in the business for a long time. I think our longest employee has been here 26 years, wow. And everybody else has been here. You know, 15 years, almost 20 years, and you know it takes some time to develop that intuition where you're just listening to their.
Speaker 1:Their kids are 14 and eight and they and maybe they're looking at Holland America or or another product like that that might not be right for for kids, where I've had that experience recently, in fact, I was on Holland America and made her a wonderful cruise line and a fantastic product, but I had my five-year-old, four-year-old at the time, my three-and-a-half-year-old on board, and they do have a kids club, but that's it.
Speaker 1:It's very small and beyond that, they don't offer a lot for children, and so it was a lesson for my wife and I to learn, which we kind of knew going in. But just, there's a lot of value if you're traveling with, with kids, to having something for them to do and having some some things that that cater to them, whether you're on land or or looking at a cruise, um, and those are are things that you don't really think about until you, until you've traveled a lot and and sent a lot of people on on vacations and had these experiences learned by by trial and error. Uh, that's a minor example, because we all know that you know, if you've, if you've interacted with kids at all, you know that they need some something to keep them entertained, um, but uh, there's, I've got it.
Speaker 2:I've got a three-year-old granddaughter and a five-year-old grandson and yes, yes, sir, they must be entertained yeah, they have loads of energy and they they need venues to work that out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, for for our you know, for mom and dad's sanity, nothing else. But there's many, many different, uh, uh, different things that we can uncover through asking pointed, targeted questions that will help us design and customize a tour cruise or whatever type of package somebody is looking for that suits someone right? And an important thing to remember about travel agents and travel agencies in general is that for the most part most travel agencies it doesn't cost you anything additional to use a travel agent. We're a free service. We get paid by the vendors and nobody's trying to upsell you in our office. We're trying to choose the right package that is perfect for you.
Speaker 1:We might recommend a higher level product than what you're looking at. That comes at a little bit more expense, but once we break down the things that are included in that product versus what you're getting with the other product, and once you start adding all of the a la carte stuff to that For example, if you're booking a mid-level luxury cruise, we might steer you towards something like a Regent, which is a high-level luxury cruise that's completely all-inclusive, including shore excursions and things like that. And once you're booking a mid-level luxury cruise at $3,500 and adding all of the shore excursions and adding your drinks and whatever else that you would put on top of that, you come out either equal to, or a little higher than, something like a Regent, which already includes all that and has smaller ships and features nicer accommodations. Those are the type of recommendations that we typically make and the type of pathways that we're looking for to guide people to the right experience.
Speaker 2:And what I've found in working with several of the agencies that I work with. The fact is people out there our clients don't really know what the options are. They don't know what's available. So if you come back and recommend something that's a little bit more expensive but it gives them a feature or benefit that they really want, they'll be more than happy to pay the difference. Wouldn't you find that to be the case?
Speaker 1:yes, um, and sometimes you know, sometimes no, sometimes they're. You know it takes some coaxing and sometimes you, you know if you, if you have this particular type of relationship. You know I have clients that I've worked with for decades and they're my friends and and I have this type of relationship where I can call them up and be like listen, I insist, you have to do this, you have to do this.
Speaker 1:And if you go and you don't like it, I'll make it up to you somehow.
Speaker 1:But this is the right package for you and you know, other times we we people will reluctantly book what we ask them to, and then they come back and send us a two-page email about how right we were about everything and how much it elevated their experience to have, you know, a family tour. Let's say where you're on, because you don't have to just take kids on cruises. There are a lot of wonderful family products from tour companies. Trafalgar Tours has their wonderful Generations products where, you know, we send a lot of grandparents, parents and the grandchildren together on one tour through Italy or something like that, where they're doing a pizza cooking class for the kids and the kids are going to something else where they're learning part of the language and experiencing part of the local culture and the parents and grandparents are doing a wine tasting at the same time or something like that. It's something where it's very enriching for everybody involved. It costs a little bit more, but for what you're getting, if you were to package that all together a la carte, it would cost you even more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. It's incredible how it really is so important to have that expertise and folks just don't understand that. And that's the one thing that I think we, as an industry can do a lot better job of is helping them. Helping folks, helping the community, helping the world know that their travel advisor is a professional expert in this and they're going to bring some things to the table that you're not going to get anywhere else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that, and that's kind of the goal of all travel agencies and travel advisors around the world is to help people understand our benefit.
Speaker 1:I think people think of us as sort of antiquated kind of a throwback and they're surprised, honestly, sometimes to find out that there are still brick and mortar travel agencies like ourselves, and they are also under the impression often that there's a big fee associated with using a travel agent. So we're always trying to sort of dispel those myths and help people to understand the benefits of using a travel agent. It's important to understand that we are continuing to educate ourselves all year long. We're learning lots and lots through the people that we're sending on these vacations. But my staff and myself are out two, three, four times a year experiencing new products or the same product that we're just kind of upping our expertise in. So your travel agent has been on that river cruise on the Danube that you're interested in, or with Viking river cruises in some other area, but understands that product and understands the layout of the ships and what's included and things like that, so they can advise you from the place of an expert.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah. It makes all the difference in the world, casey, to kind of put a ribbon around it and tie a pretty bow on our conversation here. You've been in this business for quite a while and you grew up in it and you've been around it. If you had one thing that you could share with a, a travel advisor, who maybe they're struggling a little bit right now, what would you suggest they focus on? What's the most important thing that they ought to be looking at right now?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. Um, it's uh, it's probably a little bit of a moving target year to year, to be completely honest, because this is such a volatile industry, which is a very good reason to use a travel agent, first of all, is that things are changing all the time. Regulations are changing all the time. We have the European Travel Authority security platform that we're all going to have to start using for travel to Europe in 2024. That we're all going to have to start using for travel to Europe in 2024. And so you know you need to, as a travel agent, be educated. You need to stay on top of emerging trends in the industry, where things are changing, especially with governments. Hopefully we don't see anything again like COVID in the near future, but that was something that was changing day to day. So it can feel like a mountain to climb at the start of every single day just learning and staying abreast of situations, but you need to read industry publications and just stay up on news so that you know what's going on.
Speaker 1:The biggest thing, I think I would probably say you know we all take phone calls for new reservations that are coming in and book travel, sort of that way, or have clients who call us and book one trip and we don't really hear from them again. But for the most part, we're into developing relationships and as a travel agent, your best clients and most lucrative clients are going to be the ones who repeat travel with you, and we're all incentivized in this industry to find repeat travelers. And that's another great reason to use a travel agent is that they're not going to sell you something that you don't want. They're not going to push something on you where you're going to get there and be unhappy with it. We want you to be as happy as possible on your trip and to come back with these wonderful memories and come back feeling and understanding the value that you got from working with us. And that's what I would say is sharpen your customer service skills.
Speaker 1:Be very, very responsive.
Speaker 1:That's one of my keys in my office that I really push with my staff is that you know we're responding to emails right away.
Speaker 1:We're responding to voicemails right away, as much as we can. Of course, everybody in the travel industry has lapsed in that in the past three years since COVID started, we've all been completely overwhelmed at times. That's getting better and has gotten much better all around the country. You know we're not seeing the six hour hold times that we were a year ago. So you know you just have to have to service your clients and in a way that they trust you. You know you're being honest with them and you're not trying to sell them something that they're not interested in. You're also being confident and assertive in what you're selling them and you have to believe in yourself and believe in your own set of skills and that you know what is right for this customer, not necessarily over what the customer wants or thinks, but you develop an intuition in this industry where you eventually can determine what your client is really wanting and be confident in guiding them to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, as I said earlier, chances are they don't even know what the possibilities are. They don't even know how they could do it. If they knew, then they might choose it. It helps to have a professional, and that's what we're talking about here is building a professional relationship of trust built on trust, because that's when people begin to want to do business with you. It's a professional sales operation from the get-go. If we're not doing it for the other guy, if we're not helping them get what they want, we're in deep trouble. Casey, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us here today. Really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 1:It's my pleasure, Morris. I really appreciate you inviting me.
Speaker 2:Well, you're more than welcome, my friend, for everybody else out there. Y'all go out and make it a great week, have a wonderful time and we'll see you again next week right here on the Travel Masters Community Podcast.